During the month just ended, I took a trip to Massachusetts to attend the American Literature Association’s annual conference in Boston, and also to take photos of personal interest from the point of view of my personal history and also from a genealogical angle.

I grew up in Massachusetts, in the Greater Boston area.

Practically all of my relatives came from Massachusetts. My father’s ancestors, on his father’s side, emigrated from Scotland to Boston in 1872. His relatives on his mother’s side emigrated during the colonial period and lived mostly in Essex County, north of Boston, and subsequently in the Greater Boston area.

My mother’s relatives were originally mostly from Cape Cod; some of my relatives continue to live there.

The following is a trip itinerary with photographs.

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Wednesday, May 24

I went to Danvers, Mass., which is where my mother grew up and photographed the house and block where she lived. Danvers was originally an outlying area of Salem; it was known as Salem Village. The Salem witchcraft trials arose from incidents that took place in what is now Danvers.

My mother lived at 19 Braman Street from around 1920 through 1940. The house looks shabby now.

19 Braman St., Danvers, MA

19 Braman St.

view of Braman St., Danvers

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From Danvers, I headed south, in the direction of Boston. Although my focus was mostly family history, it occurred to me, why not make a stop in Winchester, Mass., where the world famous Russian émigré sociologist and social philosopher Pitirim A. Sorokin, one of my heroes, lived?

Sorokin, his wife, and their two sons resided at 8 Cliff Street in Winchester. (Sorokin died in 1968. One of his sons still occupies the same residence.) I was interested not only to see the residence of a world renowned scholar and writer, but also to see the house because it was famous for its grounds: a garden developed and maintained by Sorokin himself, for which he had won awards from horticultural societies and of which he was proud.

I drove up the block, which was on a steep ascent, using GPS to guide me. The GPS system advised me that I had arrived at my destination, 8 Cliff Street, on my left. I saw 6 Cliff Street, but where was number 8? Number 8 was shrouded and hidden by a profusion of flowering bushes. It reminded me of the Forest of Thorns in “Sleeping Beauty.”

Next, I drove to Woodlawn Cemetery in Everett, Mass., which was close by — a beautiful cemetery where my Scotch ancestors are buried — and photographed gravestones. This required a return visit a couple of days later because a cemetery worker suggested I have one of the gravestones, for my great-great grandfather and great-great grandmother, cleaned, at the cost of seventy-five dollars.

I then drove all the way, heading south, to New Bedford, Mass., which was a flourishing city in the nineteenth century but now has a depressing look and feel to it. My maternal grandmother grew up there. I took photographs of the house where she was born in 1894. The house is on South Sixth Street. Shortly thereafter, the family moved to Wing Street in New Bedford. I intended to photograph the house, but it is no longer standing.

120 South Sixth St., New Bedford, MA. My maternal grandmother, Annie Congdon (Hart) Handy, was born there in 1894.

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Thursday, May 25

I drove to New Bedford again early Thursday morning to visit Rural Cemetery, an old cemetery where many burials occurred in the nineteenth century. There, I located the grave of my mother’s great-grandfather, John Congdon Hart. He died in 1883. He had two wives and thirteen children. His gravestone reads “J. C. Hart / 5th Mass. Batt’y.” No dates are carved on the stone. John C. Hart was a Civil War veteran. The inscription on his gravestone clearly indicates that he was proud of his Civil War service.

Section of Rural Cemetery, New Bedford, MA where John Congdon Hart (1829-1883), my maternal grandmother’s paternal grandfather, and his family are buried.

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From New Bedford, I drove to Cape Cod, a drive of about 45 minutes. I went to Cataumet Cemetery in the town of Bourne (Cataumet being a section of that town). It is a small cemetery across the street from a Methodist church where many ancestors on my mother’s side worshiped. Many of my mother’s ancestors, surnamed Handy, are buried there.

United Methodist Church, Cataumet, MA

Gravestone of Henry Thomas Handy, his wife Lydia Perkins (Ellis) Handy, and three of their children, two of whom died in infancy, Cataumet Cemetery, Cataumet, MA. Etta H. Handy was my mother’s aunt and a close relative. Henry T. Handy pursued a career as a whaler in his early adulthood and later became a farmer on Cape Cod.

I then drove to Pocasset, also on Cape Cod, which is right next door. I photographed the beautiful house and grounds where my mother’s uncle Robert S. Handy lived. My mother and her cousins spent many enjoyable times during summer vacations there. One can’t miss the house from the street, although it is set back and is fronted by an extensive greensward. It is a neighborhood landmark.

The late Robert S. Handy’s residence, County Road, Pocasset. Robert Handy (1881-1972) was my mother’s uncle.

Front yard, Robert S. Handy residence, Pocasset.

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From Cape Cod, I drove to Dorchester, Mass., to the section known as Mattapan. Dorchester is part of Boston. It took me a long time navigating local traffic to find 67 Woolson Street in Mattapan, a modest house where my father, Alan Wright Smith, was born in 1917. I had never seen the house before.

67 Woolson St., Mattapan (Boston), MA. My father was born there in 1917.

67 Woolson St.

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I got lost and stuck in Boston traffic on my return and had to call it a day.

Friday was a total change of pace: the American Literature Association (ALA) annual conference at the Westin Copley Place hotel in Boston. I attended a few lectures and the annual meeting of the International Theodore Dreiser Society.

Attendance at the Dreiser Society meeting was sparse, but I was very glad to be able to participate. I had the opportunity to meet noted Dreiser scholars such as Thomas P. Riggio, Renate von Bardeleben, Yoshinobu Hakutani, and Miriam Gogol, all of whom I already knew (not necessarily well) from prior acquaintance. Professor Hakutani made some very interesting observations comparing a work of Richard Wright’s (he is an authority on Wright), Black Boy, to an autobiographical work of Dreiser’s. I made a mental note to purchase and read Black Boy.

Other scholars present include Ashley Squires, a professor from Moscow who gave a fascinating presentation on the reception of Theodore Dreiser in Russia, where he has been for a long time — and is still — very popular. Being seated right next to her, fortuitously, I struck up a conversation. “For a Russian, you speak awfully good English,” I said. It turned out that she’s one hundred percent American and grew up in the heartland. It just so happens that she is teaching in Moscow.

I had a very enjoyable conversation with a graduate student from Oklahoma who delivered a paper on Dreiser. It was a pleasure to experience for a few minutes her sincere commitment to her studies and enthusiasm for them. A male companion was with her. They are both rabid baseball fans and were very excited about the prospect of attending their first game ever at Fenway Park that evening.

In the afternoon, I had an enjoyable get acquainted chat with a noted American literature scholar, Jerome Loving, a biographer of Whitman, Twain, and Dreiser. He was interested in talking with me about the Chester Gillette murder case, upon which Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy was based. I have done extensive research on the case.

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Saturday, May 27

On Saturday, I went back to Woodlawn Cemetery in Everett and photographed the gravestone of my Smith Scotch ancestors, which had been cleaned.

Gravestone of my Smith ancestors, Woodlawn Cemetery, Everett, MA. They included Thomas Smith, my father’s great-grandfather (who was born in Scotland); Thomas’s wife Jane (Gilchrist) Smith (also a native of Scotland); their son Thomas, Jr., my grandfather’s father (also born in Scotland); and Wlliam G. Smith, an uncle of my grandfather. (He was born in Boston just after his parents emigrated in 1872.)

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I then drove to Cambridge, Mass., where I lived until age twelve. I photographed the house on Mellen Street, a ten or fifteen minute walk from Harvard Square, where we lived. The house is in excellent condition and looks the same, except that the back yard where we used to play has been paved over. Lesley College (now Lesley University) bought the house from my father in the 1960’s, and the section of Mellen Street on which the house stands has been made into a private way and renamed.

27 Mellen Street, Cambridge, MA. I lived there from birth until 1958.

27 Mellen St., Cambridge, rear view; the fire escape is still there.

I went over to the next block, Everett Street, where my best friend, Francis Donlan, lived. I photographed the apartment complex at 11 Everett Street where he lived. It looked the same, which is to say it sort of “reemerged” into my visual memory/consciousness — I had forgotten. Francis’s father was the janitor there. Parking in Cambridge must be notoriously difficult. Everett Street was one way, and restricted/no parking signs were everywhere.

Apartment house on Everett St. where my best friend Francis Donlan lived.

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My last stop in Cambridge was Oxford Street, where I photographed my old elementary school. I walked right past it. Remembering the order of the streets, I was sure I had missed it, but how? I was looking for the familiar old building and schoolyard. I asked a middle aged man in a playground with two children, “Is there an elementary school near here?”

“Yes,” he replied, “the Baldwin School,” pointing in the direction which I had come from. The school, which I had inadvertently passed, was a block away.

The school when I attended it was named the Agassiz School. I always liked the sound of the name; it sounded distinctive. It was also hard for an elementary schooler to spell.

The school was named in honor of Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807-1873), a world renowned Swiss-American biologist and geologist who was a professor of zoology and geology at Harvard University. The school’s name was changed to the Maria L. Baldwin School in 2002, due to objections to the theories of Agassiz, which have been characterized as racist. Maria Louise Baldwin (1856 -1922), an African American educator and civic leader, was principal of the school from 1889 until 1922.

I didn’t recognize the school building, and the playground where I used to play kickball was gone.

The theories of Agassiz that have led to his being discredited are based on polygenism, the idea that races were created separately, that they could be classified on the basis of specific climatic zones, and that they were endowed with unequal attributes. It appears that the attribution of racism to Agassiz is not such an open and shut case. He did not support slavery, for example. In general, the renaming of buildings and monuments to conform to changing views makes me uncomfortable. A couple of former classmates whom I have mentioned this to feel, on the contrary, that the change of the school’s name was entirely appropriate.

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Leaving Cambridge on Saturday morning, I drove as fast as I could to Oak Grove cemetery in Falmouth, Mass., on Cape Cod, wishing to arrive there before the cemetery supervisor, who works a half day on Saturdays, left. I got stuck in a traffic jam of holiday travelers crossing the Bourne Bridge, which spans the Cape Cod Canal.

At the cemetery, I found quite a few ancestral graves in the same section. I never would have found them without the cemetery supervisor’s help. My mother was born in Falmouth. Her maternal grandparents are buried there, as are several of their ancestors.

Gravestone of William Hewins (1801-1893) of Falmouth, MA and his wife Love (Handy) Hewins (1804-1884), as well as two of their sons. William and Love were great-grandparents of my maternal grandmother Annie C. (Hart) Handy on her mother’s side.

Gravestone of John Swift, 2nd (1806-1864) of Falmouth, MA. He was my maternal grandmother’s great-grandfather on her mother’s side.

Gravestone of Llewellyn Russell Hewins (1834-1908) of Falmouth, MA. He was the grandfather of my maternal grandmother, Annie (Hart) Handy, on her mother’s side. The birthdate on the stone is off by a year.

Gravestone of Arabella F. (Swift) Hewins (1834-1868), first wife of Llewellyn Russell Hewins of Falmouth. She was the grandmother of my maternal grandmother.

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From Falmouth on the Cape, I turned around and drove right back, heading north and west, to Arlington, Mass., a town adjacent to Cambridge and only six miles northwest of Boston. It was practically a second home town for me in my youth. I photographed the big, stately house on a hilltop on Cliff Street in Arlington Heights where my paternal grandparents, T. Gordon and Esther (Whittredge) Smith, lived in the 1930’s and ’40s, which I remember visiting.

And, the house on Wellington Street, near Arlington Center, where my grandparents lived in the 1950’s and ‘60s. I used to take the streetcar from Cambridge to visit them at the latter residence.

37 Wellington St., Arlington Heights, MA

It was adjacent to Spy Pond, which I photographed, and there was a baseball field across the street where I would sometimes watch games with my grandfather. I photographed that too.

Spy Pond, Arlington, MA

baseball field adjacent to Wellington St.

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I then drove to East Boston, where my Smith Scotch ancestors lived and where my paternal grandfather, Thomas Gordon Smith, was born and raised. My great-great grandfather, Thomas Smith, settled there in the 1870’s after emigrating with his wife and children from Scotland. I found the house where my paternal grandfather was born and the house he moved to with his widowed mother and siblings when he was about ten years old. I found the residences where his grandfather, my great-great grandfather, lived at 606 and 635 Bennington Street. They are in good condition. The latter residence is owned and occupied now by the Salesians of St. John Bosco, a religious order.

606 Bennington St., East Boston, MA. The family of Thomas Smith, my great-great grandfather, lived their briefly in the 1880’s.

Photos of 635 Bennington St., East Boston. My great-great grandparents lived there for over 20 years. Photographs by Roger W. Smith.

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I left East Boston at around 7 p.m. on Saturday evening and drove northward, hoping that I could perhaps reach Crane Beach on the North Shore before it got dark. The beach is located in the town of Ipswich. I remember going there with my parents in the 1950’s. My mother knew the beach well. It is said to be one of the most beautiful beaches in Massachusetts.

A main objective of mine on this trip was to photograph ancestral sites and graves. Graves are very difficult to find; it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. But, I succeeded beyond my expectations. Not only in finding graves, which are invaluable as genealogical sources, but also in finding and photographing ancestral residences and streetscapes and, most importantly, the houses, hitherto unknown, where my father’s father and mother’s mother and also my father were born.

I decided to share this information with as many descendants as I could, emailing them photographs with commentary.

Their response, in most cases lack of response, was much worse than I could have anticipated — disappointing, and in, a couple of instances, not just disappointing, but inconsiderate and mean spirited. Hardly anyone bothered to acknowledge having received the photos.

Worst of all was the response of some of my relatives (I shared photos and pertinent information only with descendants of the ancestors whose graves and houses I had photographed) who actually COMPLAINED, saying that because I emailed the photos and information to them, they found it to be a nuisance. It had taken me about to week to go through the photos, select the best ones, tweak them, identify them correctly, and write commentary so that my relatives would know whose grave or house it was and how that individual was related to us.

I wrote back to the disgruntled respondents, my relatives, merely saying: “This has involved a great deal of time, effort, and expense on my part.” I mentioned, in replying to them, the time, effort, and expense merely for purposes of comparison: what went into the project versus what would be required for someone to open emails, read them, and download what was perhaps a total of 25 photos. (I do not recall the exact number.) Considerable effort over several days (not counting the spade work, planning, organizing, and dissemination of the materials) versus a few minutes of one’s time for each email.

Regarding the supposedly great inconvenience of being bombarded with emails, what the pros and cons are, it’s not worth discussing here, but I would have thought that someone could have overlooked this (despite whatever their preferences are) in consideration of receiving hitherto unavailable photos and information that were obtained at great effort and considerable expense, and which were available nowhere else, that they would never have known about or had access to otherwise. I am talking about things such as gravestones and homesteads of people such as my nineteenth century ancestors, my ancestors from Scotland, the houses were my father and two of my grandparents were born, and so on. (When, say I “my,” I mean also “their,” that is, our relatives.)

I felt it incumbent upon me to share these materials with as many relatives as I could think of contacting and had the email addresses of, hoping that they would disseminate them among their children and grandchildren. I thought they would be appreciative of this and was taken completely by surprise.

It seems to me that it’s a matter of weighing in the balance what one would rather have: the “inconvenience” (as they conceive it to be) of having a few additional emails (of course, they will say, “what do you mean, a few?,” as if they were greatly imposed upon, put out, inconvenienced; choose your participle) within the space of a couple of days in their inboxes, and having to download a photo or two with a simple click, versus the thought, which does not seem to occurred to them, of what goes into ascertaining the facts thorough prior research (such as, where was such and such ancestor buried? where were my father and grandparents born? where in Boston, at exactly what address, did my great-great grandfather and his children live?). Using those facts to locate materials, planning such a trip, driving to various locales not necessarily close to one another, locating the actual graves and houses, and so on. It would seem that the favor and services done for them far outweigh the “inconvenience,” as they perceive it. But, people seem to take things for granted. The last thing they would ever do is look up such stuff themselves. When it is handed to them on a silver platter, they don’t appreciate it but instead complain, vent, and find cause for fault.

I enjoy such projects and find them rewarding, despite the effort involved. And, it is my credo that such materials should be disseminated as widely as possible among parties to whom they would not, presumably, be of no interest or relevance. But, I have experienced such lack of appreciation and inconsiderateness in the past. From persons who have made inquiries of me and requests for information and materials related to scholarly or genealogical research. I always go all out to respond and share what I have. It is incredible how often people don’t even bother to acknowledge receipt or say thanks.

русский перевод см ниже

My essay about the Russian-American sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin which follows is approximately 4,000 words long. A downloadable Word document, which contains the text of the essay in both English and Russian — is available above.

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“Sorokin”

by Roger W. Smith

The following essay about the Russian-American sociologist and social philosopher Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968) comprises an email of mine which was occasioned by a message I received a few days ago from a reader of this blog.

Sorokin is one of my intellectual and personal heroes. I have always admired him. Greatly. He is one of my intellectual idols. I revere him on account of his works; his deep and earnest thought; his sincerity; his originality; the excitement which I felt upon encountering his works as an intellectually curious and intellectually hungry adolescent; and the fact that he always gave me the feeling of being a kindred spirit, one whose views could not be pigeonholed and who wasn’t afraid to take unpopular positions. (Sorokin used the oxymoron Conservative Christian Anarchist to describe his Weltanschauung — world view. Conservative Christian Anarchist was used by Henry Adams to describe himself, as Sorokin noted.)

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I discovered Sorokin in my local public library at age 17 when I was a senior in high school. (It seems that practically every important book I ever read was discovered by serendipity, as was the case in this instance.) There was a book on the library’s shelves which caught my eye: “The Crisis of Our Age” by one P. A. Sorokin, whom I had never heard of.

“This looks interesting,” I thought.

Philosophy of history.

“The Crisis of Our Age” was an intensely stimulating and exciting read for a 17 year old with an interest in history and, especially, the history of ideas (in contrast to event-based history, which has never had much interest for me).

I could not put the book down, devoured it. It was a very rewarding intellectual exercise for me at that stage in my intellectual development. It challenged me, stimulated me mentally, and greatly expanded my intellectual horizons. I was introduced to numerous big words which I dutifully looked up, greatly expanding my knowledge of abstract words used in academic writing and discourse. (“Syncretism” is one I recall.) The book enlarged for me the mental landscape and scope of my knowledge of intellectual history.

History was one of my best subjects, and I wound up majoring in it in college. The book was not actually history, and it was anything but the usual dry academic tome or fact-laden historical monograph. It was a mélange of historical, cultural, social, and intellectual history plus interpretive analysis by Sorokin. It was supposedly an objective sociological work, a condensed version of the author’s four volume magnum opus, “Social and Cultural Dynamics.”

It was anything but objective, despite the statistical charts and data, collected laboriously by the author and research assistants, which supposedly provided the “scientific” (or social scientific) underpinnings for his findings. For “findings,” one should perhaps substitute pronouncements or sweeping assessments.

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Over the course of time, I learned about Pitirim A. Sorokin’s personal life.

He was born in 1889 among the Komi, a Uralic ethnic group in the northeast of European Russia. He was orphaned at an early age and eventually became a student at a teacher’s college. He was arrested and imprisoned in 1906 for anti-czarist revolutionary political activities. Upon the outbreak of the so called February Revolution (in March 1917), he became a founder of the Russian Peasant Soviet, which was dispersed by the Communists. He was, from the beginning of the Revolution, vehemently opposed to Communist leaders such as Lenin and Trotsky.

He was arrested twice by the Bolsheviks and was condemned to death, but was freed on Lenin’s orders and allowed to return to his academic activities as a professor at the University of St. Petersburg. In 1922, he was banished from the Soviet Union. He emigrated to the United States in 1923 and, in 1930, was invited to become the first professor and chairman of the Sociology Department at Harvard University. He retired from teaching duties in 1955, but continued to write. He was a controversial figure and vigorously opposed trends in the Harvard sociology department after stepping down as chairman.

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Sorokin had pretensions to be a scientist – a social scientist – and believed he was using the scientific method. He larded his books with statistics; but the “science” and statistical analysis somehow never seemed convincing, and it appeared that what he really was, was a social philosopher, not a social scientist.

The scientific slant, such as it was, in his thinking and writing undoubtedly came from his studies at the Psycho-Neurological Institute in Petrograd and the University of St. Petersburg under scholars such as Ivan Pavlov. He became, in the words of Sorokin biographer Barry V. Johnston, “an empirical neopositivist.”

I agree with critics such as Arnold Toynbee who found fault with Sorokin’s methodology and accused him of creating a tautological work, a massive tautology. Essentially, they said, he decided what he was going to say first, then engaged in pseudoscientific research to prove what was for him a foregone conclusion, with shoddy methodology and biases that predetermined what his research would find. Then, the critics seemed to be saying, he propagated simplistic, self-evident conclusions. The art of the Idealistic period (e.g., the Middle Ages) was spiritual in its focus and nature. The art of our present, Sensate era is not spiritual; there is much nudity and erotic content. And so on. The present, Sensate era is overly materialistic and has become decadent (plus the factor of aggression and bloodshed between nations), but a new, more spiritual era will right things, so to speak, because history is cyclical. The focus of the Idealistic Middle Ages was otherworldly. The Ideational period shows a mixture of Idealistic and Sensate elements and represents a transitional phase.

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Sorokin saw history as cyclical and as alternating periodically between recurring phases: Ideational, Idealistic, and Sensate. To illustrate what Sorokin meant by these three types of cultures or cultural phases predominating at various periods in history, a timeframe helps:

Ideational — the High Middle Ages represented such a culture in full flower. “Its major principle or value was God.”

Sensate — it began roughly with the sixteenth century and is based on the premise or ethos that “True reality and value is sensory”; it reached its apogee (and unleashed monstrous destructive forces) in the twentieth century.

Idealistic — a mix of the above two cultural types; represented by European culture in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. “Its major premise was that true reality is partly super sensory and partly sensory.” St. Thomas Aquinas is one exemplar of such thinking.

It should be noted that Sorokin believed that these three cultural forms alternated rhythmically over all historical time. He includes examples from antiquity as well.

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Shoddy methodology? I would say yes. But, for an intellectually curious high school student, this was indeed exciting stuff — it seemed profound. And, I have great respect, as stated above, for Sorokin the man and scholar. He wasn’t afraid to attack big themes, and some of his work is profoundly original and important in its implications.

Sorokin counterattacked his critics caustically. He loved a good fight. Despite expressing profound admiration for Arnold Toynbee’s oeuvre, he felt, not surprisingly, that Toynbee’s works were conceptually and methodologically flawed in several important respects wherein Sorokin thought his own works surpassed Toynbee’s. (Ditto for the work of another philosopher of history, Oswald Spengler, whose works Sorokin found to be unpersuasive and methodologically flawed.)

It has been said that Sorokin was an arrogant scholar. Perhaps so. Nevertheless, I found much to like and admire about him.

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On the first day of freshman orientation at Brandeis University, my mother accompanied me to the campus and spent the day with me. We sort of took in the whole place. Among other things, I had to check out the library, which met with my approval. The first thing I did was to go to the card catalogue. “Let’s see if they have Sorokin’s works,” I said to her. They did, several works. I was pleased, and my mother beamed, showing that she shared my enthusiasm vicariously.

In my freshman year, I took English Composition. For our first assignment, we were told to write a paper in which we were instructed to “define style,” which I tried mightily to do. (I didn’t quite understand what underlay the assignment.) In the next class, the instructor singled out my paper for criticism. I thought it was pretty good, and one or two other students in the class (notably Ricardo Millett, an exchange student from Panama who went on to have a distinguished academic career) felt so too.

In the paper, I quoted a passage from “The Crisis of Our Age” as an example of what I considered an excellent, distinctive style:

The crisis is here in all its stark and unquestionable reality. We are in the midst of an enormous conflagration burning everything into ashes. In a few weeks millions of human lives are uprooted; in a few hours century-old cities are demolished; in a few days kingdoms are erased. Red human blood flows in broad streams from one end of the earth to the other. Ever expanding misery spreads its gloomy shadow over larger eras. The fortunes, happiness and comfort of untold millions have disappeared. Peace, security and safety have vanished. Prosperity and well-being have become in many countries but a memory; freedom a mere myth. Western culture is covered by a blackout. A great tornado sweeps over the whole of mankind. (“The Crisis of Our Age,” pp. 14-15; note: the book was published at the beginning of World War II)

The instructor, Robert Stein (a chain smoker known to students as “C plus Stein”), read the passage out loud in class and pounced on me for making such a claim. He drew a red line through my paper and wrote something like “No!” in the margin. Purple prose, he said. Exactly the OPPOSITE of excellence of style. (The freshman comp Bible in those days was Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style.” Sorokin would probably have had difficulty passing a course of theirs.) I was taken aback by Stein’s criticisms and his take on Sorokin the writer.

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Sorokin does have a characteristic style which could easily be parodied, should one care to. He uses jargon and his own private verbiage, “Sorokinisms” (“intellectual chewing gum” for example), when he feels it will serve his purposes. He will use big words (which is not necessarily a “sin”), actual or near neologisms, and words and phrases drawn from various languages, especially (and notably) Latin — he was addicted to Latin mottoes. He can be guilty of “overwriting.” Yet, his style is basically clear, punchy, and arresting. He wants, above all, to communicate.

He obviously had linguistic ability. His native language was Komi (a language spoken in the northeastern European part of Russia). I was interested to read that, as Sorokin wrote, in later life, he had forgotten it. He was, of course, fluent in Russian from his school days on. He knew both German and Latin — knowledge of the former served him well for sociological studies — and undoubtedly other languages (apparently including Italian) as well. He learned English after emigrating in the mid-1920’s. Some of his faults as a stylist — and I feel that in many respects he was actually an excellent writer — may have been attributable to imperfect knowledge of English.

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I wrote a research paper on Sorokin for the freshman comp course. One day I encountered Mr. Stein in the college snack bar. Despite being regarded as a prickly and difficult teacher, he found my writing to be good and showed respect for me. “Why are you so hung up on Sorokin?” he asked. He apparently knew a former Harvard student who had studied under Sorokin (or knew someone who had) and from that person had learned that Sorokin was regarded as something of a crackpot at Harvard. This surprised me, and though I was not about to alter my views, I did later learn more about Sorokin that seemed in accord with what Mr. Stein had said. A few anecdotal factoids emerged:

— Sorokin could be “over the top” as a lecturer in that the whole course – he taught a required course at Harvard, Social Relations, which was popular and heavily subscribed – was devoted to his theories. He was said to regard himself as a great thinker up there with Aristotle and who knows else?

— Some graduate students (according to their reminiscences) found him difficult to have as an academic advisor. (But not all; he was beloved by some former students.)

— Sorokin had been ousted as department chairman in a bitter power struggle with Talcott Parsons. They detested one another and each had contempt for the other’s theories and methodologies. Their approaches were diametrically opposed, Parsons being the classic dry social scientist, Sorokin the quixotic figure writing jeremiads. (“Quixotic” was a term my former therapist actually used to describe him.)

— Sorokin wasn’t even teaching by the time I took Mr. Stein’s course. He was still writing and lecturing, but he had already retired from Harvard. (He retired from teaching in 1955 and continued on as director of a research institute at Harvard which he had founded until 1959).

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Not knowing that Sorokin had already retired, I asked my older brother, who was attending Harvard, whether he knew of Sorokin. He did not, but he said that if Sorokin was still teaching at Harvard, we would certainly attend one of his lectures together. Needless to say, this never came about.

My father also attended Harvard at a time when Sorokin, who taught at Harvard from 1930–1955, was teaching there. My father’s transcript indicates that he took Social Relations 1a and Social Relations 1b, a two semester sequence comprising a required core course, in the 1948-1949 academic year. I am certain that the course would have been taught by Sorokin. But my father (who may or may not have been aware of my interest in Sorokin, I don’t recall) and I never discussed Sorokin.

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Influenced by Sorokin, I chose sociology as my major at Brandeis. I had some excellent sociology professors (notably Gordon Fellman and Lewis A. Coser, whom Sorokin new personally), but the courses were a letdown and I changed my major to history. Sorokin was NEVER mentioned. Sociology on a grand scale it was not (although we did read sociologists such as Durkheim and Max Weber who wrote seminal works of a similar scope).

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Insofar as my extracurricular reading of Sorokin was concerned, I progressed from theoretical works, e.g., “The Crisis of Our Age” — which was based on the Lowell Lectures which Sorokin delivered at Harvard University in 1941; the book was actually a condensed version, aimed at the general reading public, of what Sorokin considered his major scholarly work — to reading autobiographical works of his.

“Leaves from A Russian Diary” (1924; enlarged edition with afterword, 1950), which details Sorokin’s experiences as a revolutionary opponent of the Czarist government, an official in the short lived Kerensky government, and an anti-Bolshevik, was a work that I could not put down. It has a cogency and dramatic interest, being written at white heat, so to speak, that make it compelling. It reads like a novel, a sort of “Les Misérables” minus about a thousand pages. l feel that it is an underrated book and could never understand why it never achieved a wide readership. For me, it is the best book on the Russian Revolution, the only one I practically ever read about it, in fact. It made me feel what the revolution must have been like. I regard it as a classic, and I felt it was very well written, much more so than when Sorokin was writing as a scholar.

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“Russia and the United States” was another one of my first Sorokin books. It was not readily available, but our college library had it and, as was customary for me, I read it on my own, independently of coursework. The book held my interest from start to finish.

I have always felt that “Russia and the United States” is one of Sorokin’s best books, modest though it may be in scope. In fact, I think that the fact that Sorokin was not overreaching in this book is part of its value and appeal. Also, Sorokin got it right. It’s a sensible book, written at a time when the Soviet Union was regraded with outright hostility, fear, and suspicion, and written by a scholar (Sorokin) who had been banished from the USSR, barely escaping execution, because of his fervent anti-Communism.

I read the book at a time, the mid-1960’s, when the Cold War was at or near its zenith, when the USSR was regarded as our mortal enemy. I myself had rarely harbored anti-Russian feelings, but I was keenly aware, along with everyone else, of the political undertones. When Khrushchev stood beaming in a cornfield during a visit to the USA in the late 1950’s and pictures were published in newspapers the next day, one of our teachers told us, “Don’t let him fool you. You can never and should never trust him.”

What Sorokin said, basically, in “Russia and the United States,” which was published in 1941 — meaning that it was written before the USSR became our wartime ally — was that a careful study of the lineaments, so to speak, of the two countries would reveal that they actually had much in common as countries and societies, and that the two nations would eventually become less hostile to one another over time because of commonalities.

As Sorokin put it, the two countries “exhibit an essential similarity or congeniality in a number of important psychological, cultural, and social values”: vast territories with all that implies (such as various climates, topography, and regional characteristics); rich natural and human resources; major cultural and urban centers; the fact that both countries were world powers; and so on.

This seemed counterintuitive at the time, but I sensed then that Sorokin was right, and history proved him right, insofar that the Cold War came to an unexpected end. I myself had always admired the USSR – if not as a political entity – as a country with vast expanses like us and a multiplicity of nationalities and ethnic groups with a rich, continually growing culture ranging from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky. Just like America. Huge, diverse, all encompassing, culturally fertile; and with a vibrant economy.

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Sorokin’s autobiography, “A Long Journey,” came out when I was in college. I had to read it. I am so glad I acquired and read it when I did. It is truthful and revelatory, not in the sense of a confessional, but in the sense that Sorokin is straightforward and unafraid to tell it as he saw and experienced it, without worrying about how this or that comment or remark about others might be received. Underneath the academic theorizing, he was a simple man with simple tastes and plain, unvarnished, almost childlike, feelings. (He took great pride in a garden of his at his home in Winchester, Massachusetts, which won awards from horticultural societies; he came of peasant stock and was proud of it.)

It ranges in subject matter from Sorokin’s days as a revolutionary, to his becoming an emigre, his early teaching career in Minnesota, his Harvard years, and, interestingly, his family life, his love of music (he was a good friend of Boston Symphony Orchestra music director Serge Koussevitzky), his love of the outdoors, and disputes with scholars. He was miffed when, as an emeritus, he submitted a paper to the American Sociological Review that was rejected. He is unapologetic about opinions of his which often ran counter to prevailing academic and intellectual fashions. It makes for interesting reading. Dull he is not.

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I have perused over the years but have never read as carefully as I would have liked “Social and Cultural Mobility” and “The Sociology of Revolution.” The latter work, written by Sorokin in the early 1920’s when he was a refugee in Czechoslovakia, asserts that all revolutions are disasters in the making which result in the unleashing of violent and destructive forces in lieu of social amelioration. “A society which has never known how to live,” Sorokin wrote, “which has been incapable of carrying through adequate reforms, but has thrown itself in the arms of revolution, has to pay the penalty for its sins by the death of a considerable proportion of its members.” This is characteristic Sorokin. He was not given to dry summations or mealy-mouthed pronouncements. (Note: I have, since this writing, read “The Sociology of Revolution.” It is a remarkable work which, despite somewhat “old fashioned’ scholarship, has not become outdated or less valid despite having been published almost a hundred years ago.)

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In the mid-1970’s, I was in a second rate bookstore in lower Manhattan one Sunday and found a remaindered copy of a book of Sorokin’s that had been posthumously published by a university press: “Hunger as a Factor in Human Affairs.” T. Lynn Smith, a former academic colleague and friend of Sorokin’s, had lovingly prepared the book for publication, along with Sorokin’s widow, Elena P. Sorokin, the translator. The book contained wonderful illustrations of Sorokin and his family from his wife’s collection. What’s more, it was a compelling read.

“[Hunger as a Factor in Human Affairs] was written by Sorokin during the Russian famine of 1919-1921 while he was still in Russia. It was written by a starving and freezing scholar in the midst of a famine that he felt was caused by the revolution to which he was very hostile. Banished from the Soviet Union in 1922, Sorokin managed to smuggle out some proofs which lay untouched until 1972 when Sorokin’s wife Elena began [a] translation.” (http://www.sociosite.net/sociologists/sorokin_pitirim.php)

“Hunger as a Factor in Human Affairs” — titled in the original Russian “Golod kak faktor: vliyaniye goloda na povedeniye cheloveka i sotsial’nuyu organizatsiyu zhizni” (Hunger as a factor: the impact of hunger on people’s behavior, social organization of life) — was a compelling book not simply because of the circumstances under which it was written but owing in part to conclusions derived from them. Sorokin, then a professor at the University of Leningrad, wrote it under conditions of great privation during the Russian famine. The book concludes with remarks by Sorokin that seem to have wide applicability: that, when food is scarce, government control and repression increase. Sorokin, noted for his colorful, pithy phrasing, concludes with the words “Caveat consules!” (let the consuls beware).

The book was a revelation for me. Often, I have found with writers in general that their early works are among their best. This was certainly true of Sorokin. One could see him here, in one of his first books, in a “pristine” state — when he was perhaps less preachy and less addicted to writing in a sometimes overblown fashion, in the manner of a grand scholar — at his best. It is a provocative, original, and groundbreaking work, and one from which the conclusions can be extrapolated and applied to various governments and economic conditions. Sorokin’s main point was stated as follows on the penultimate page:

Ceteris paribus, with the increase of the wealth of a country and a decrease of famine, and if there is an average proprietary differentiation, the curve of compulsory statism will decrease under any power and form of government, and vice versa.

In other words, there is an inverse relationship between scarcity or abundance of food and the degree of individual freedoms permitted versus the lack of it. Think of the United States, where food has always been abundant, famine conditions have never been known, and individual freedoms are greater than those permitted in most of the world.

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I also read “The American Sex Revolution,” also while in college, which is a hopelessly outdated book. But, at least Sorokin was bold enough to tackle the subject.

— Roger W. Smith

February 2017; updated April 2019

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Addendum: The same points which Sorokin made in his seminal work “Golod kak factor” (translated into English by his wife and published posthumously in the United States in 1975 as “Hunger as a Factor in Human Affairs”) are made in an article by Sorokin entitled “Impoverishment and the Expansion of Governmental Control” which was published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1926 (American Journal of Sociology, vol. 32, no. 2, Sept. 1926) shortly after Sorokin had arrived in the United States and been appointed a professor at the University of Minnesota.

In the article, drawing on examples from various historical periods and civilizations, Sorokin makes incisive points with wide applicability about governmental control, noting that, when there is a yawning gap between the relative economic conditions of the rich and the poor and when food is scarce, government control and repression increase.

Addendum: Please note that I have many articles about Pitirim A. Sorokin and some articles by Sorokin that I would be willing to share. My email address is available in the “About” section of this site. — Roger W. Smith

The following is an email of mine to a friend which resulted from a conversation we were having yesterday.

— Roger W. Smith

February 3, 2017

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You asked me yesterday if I liked Shostakovich.

The answer: do I ever!

He’s a quintessentially nationalistic composer. He wrote quite a bit of music with overt programmatic, thematic, or patriotic content. He also wrote much music that is very modern and very twentieth century — worthy of (and, in fact, better than, in my opinion) a Stravinsky.

A polystylist, Shostakovich developed a hybrid voice, combining a variety of different musical techniques into his works. His music is characterized by sharp contrasts, elements of the grotesque, and ambivalent tonality; the composer was also heavily influenced by the neo-classical style pioneered by Igor Stravinsky, and (especially in his symphonies) by the post-Romanticism associated with Gustav Mahler. [Mahler was indeed a great influence on Shostakovich, and it has been said that one can hear echoes of the former composer’s works in the symphonies of the latter.]

I am not a musicologist, so I can speak only from experience as a listener, for the most part. But, I once said to my former therapist, who had an interest in Russian history and culture, that I believed Shostakovich to be one of the twentieth century’s greatest (if not the greatest) composers. A rival? I might suggest Bartók. I bet few others would make that choice.

Shostakovich reminds me of Aaron Copland. I feel that the two are comparable, except that I feel Shostakovich is the greater composer (which is not to detract from my admiration for Copland, whose works I do not know as well as I should).

Both he and Copland are infused with their country’s spirit, land, and grandeur. Both were prolific and composed in a wide variety of forms on the macro and micro levels, so to speak. Both composed supremely patriotic and nationalistic music which, when you hear it, results in your thinking, saying: it is so Russian or so American; it could only be Russian or American.

Both were not afraid to attempt grand themes — the Russian Revolution and The Great Patriotic War; Appalachia, the heartlands, Lincoln, the Great Depression, democracy — yet both composed highly cerebral, small scale works (e.g., their chamber works).

Nationalism and patriotism notwithstanding, both were fully in touch with the musical trends and styles of their times. Their music is anything but hackneyed, clichéd, or retrograde.

Neither composer was a political stooge or apologist. Shostakovich ran afoul of Stalinism and lived in fear of reprisal, it has been stated in books about him. (His music was criticized by Stalin himself.) Copland had leftist and Zionist sympathies.

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A word or two about my own experience of Shostakovich.

My parents gave me a portable record player as a gift upon my high school graduation. One of the first LP’s I purchased was a budget recording of Shostakovich’s fifth symphony conducted by Ernest Ansermet.

I was greatly impressed and stirred by the work, which I (by no means alone) regard as a masterpiece and one of the greatest symphonies ever. It is work which, in my opinion, is infused with the “Russian spirit,” whatever that means. It is haunting and powerful and has a sort of inner logic and sense of inevitability, a coherence, and a tightness of construction that remind me of Beethoven’s Fifth.

Another work of Shostakovich’s that I discovered early was his eleventh symphony (“The Year 1905”; 1957). The social philosopher Pitirim A. Sorokin, a Russian emigre who taught at Harvard, mentioned it in passing in his autobiography. Being an admirer of Sorokin, I had to hear the work. My uncle Roger Handy gave it to me as a Christmas present on an LP of a performance by André Cluytens. It was one of the first performances of the symphony; recordings of Shostakovich’s eleventh were rare then. The eleventh symphony is subtitled “The Year 1905”; it describes, musically, events of the Russian Revolution of 1905. It is extremely powerful and lyrical.

One can also observe such mastery of tone color in, say, the fifth symphony. And, Shostakovich will often surprise, delight, or astonish the listener with original scoring, such as the piano passages in his first symphony and his fifth.

Eventually, I discovered Shostakovich’s quartets, which I feel are right up there with Bartók’s. Shostakovich wrote fifteen symphonies and fifteen quartets. I haven’t even mentioned his concertos. He was prolific!

An observation I would make about Shostakovich — being mindful that I am no doubt stating the obvious and that one doesn’t need my input to realize this – is that he is usually very original from one work to the next. One never knows what to expect or what one is going to hear. His fourth symphony, for example, was a complete break with his second and third symphonies, which were nothing like his brilliant first symphony, which was wholly fresh and original and which seemed to almost come out of nowhere; it did not seem to be indebted to a tutor or predecessor. His seventh, eighth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth symphonies have similarities, but the fourth, fifth, sixth, ninth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth symphonies are totally different, and each of them differs a lot from one of the others in that group. Similar astonishing variety of form and mood from one piece to the next can be seen in the quartets.

I should have also mentioned, individually, Shostakovich’s eighth symphony. It is a powerful work and one of his best. It doesn’t seem to be performed as often as it should. Don’t listen to it if you don’t feel like experiencing anguish — it is a work that conveys despair. There is very little sunlight; Vivaldi it is not.